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noob question

I saw it in many AAR that peoples tend to place their cities two tiles. What is the reason behind this strategy?
Another question is I have yet to see a tall play style. People tend to expand a lot and without building any buildings in their cities. Players focus on warriors, workers and settlers. Is tall play not a good style in ffh?
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I'll take a stab at answering this although I haven't played FfH in a while and never competitively. Also, it's a huge question, so others might answer differently.

There are short-term and (sort of) long term benefits to putting cities near each other.

In the short term, the settler doesn't have to spend many turns walking, so it starts producing sooner. Cities that are closer together are easier for workers to dance back and forth between. Finally, cities that overlap can both work the same tiles (so one can work cottages non-stop).

The long term reason goes hand in hand with why you don't see people with a "tall" style. Cities in FfH (and vanilla Civ4) don't give you much. If we think that we need as many hammers and as much commerce as possible in order to win, cities give a little bit from specialists, a little from buildings, and a little from trade routes. Instead, the majority of the hammers and commerce come from the tiles. This means that the city that works the tile is relatively unimportant as long as there is a city working the tile. Part of the reason cities are placed near each other is so no tile gets wasted.

Now, a city working a 4 commerce tile with a Tax Office (+25% commerce) makes more gold than a city working that same tile without a Tax Office. But that's an expensive building, and instead of building the Tax Office and getting +25% commerce, you could have built a settler for fewer hammers in order to work more tiles to get more commerce. When it's better to build a Tax Office and when it's better to build a settler will vary from game to game, but the question will always be "In order to get more hammers and commerce, should I work more tiles or get more buildings to improve my tiles?"

Obviously the answer is "Do both." We want to work as many tiles as possible while multiplying the hammers & commerce as high as possible. Every population point in FfH takes more food than the previous one. Imagine a city that has 4 4-commerce tiles available. It's free to work the first 4c tile. To work the next, we need to accumulate 22 food. To work the third, we'll need 24 food and so on. We want to work all the 4c tiles. It takes more food for 1 city to work 8 tiles than 2 cities to work 4 tiles. Therefore, if all we care about in order to win is maximizing commerce and hammers, we want to work our tiles as fast as possible with fast cities. Of course, this doesn't always hold true: maintenance costs stop us from completely spamming cities and larger cities are able to build the more expensive units more easily. The crux of the gameplay lies in figuring out when it's more efficient to get more tiles and when it's better to make the tiles you already have better. The Tax Office (in FfH, at least) is 200 hammers. A settler is 120. How much more does a Tax Office get you in exchange for those extra 80 hammers?

The summary: In order to win, you want as many hammers and as much commerce as possible. In FfH (and Civ4) your hammers and commerce mainly come from your tiles, not your cities. Your cities have ways to make your tiles better, but the beauty of the game is that the player has to judge for every game when buildings or settlers are better.

P.S. I first encountered the "tall vs. wide" debates in Civ5. There, famously, the most robust empires only had 4 cities. (Multiplayers and speed-runners may disagree.) Civ5 enabled "tall" builds because the cities themselves gave huge amounts of resource through trade routes and through buildings, while the player was harshly penalized for every city they planted. Civ5 was anomalous; in the "empire builder" games before Civ5 that I'm familiar with, one always wanted more territory, whether land or planets or whatever.
There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.
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In addition to what naufrager said:

In multiplayer, you don't really have time to build your cities tall.  Games are usually over by about T120 (quick), using units no further advanced than mages/priests/chariots.  You might be able to get your capital and one or two other cities to size 20 by then, but no more than that.  Further, a lot of buildings just don't pay for themselves in that amount of time.  Even ignoring the food cost, it's really hard to come up with 20 happiness when you haven't gone very far down the tech tree.

If you're already not going to be able to use all 20 tiles for your first city, there are a lot of benefits in packing cities in tightly.  You want to be always working the good tiles where you've spent worker time, but (to take one example) if the first city is capped on happiness, it shouldn't be working food resources.  Best if you can swap them to another city that can afford to grow right now, rather than having to find, claim, and improve another good tile for the next city.

Packing cities in tightly also makes it easier to use a military, easier to handle culture, easier to manage workers.  A city that's not going to grow a lot doesn't necessarily need culture, especially if its neighbors do have culture.  If it's close to the rest of your empire then you waste less time moving workers around, build fewer roads.  Keeping the area you have to defend small lets you do more with less.
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Wow, thanks a lot. Didn't expect the long and informative answer.
I recently play Vox Populis of Civ V a lot. That mod has very good design. Tall and wide are all viable in SP. Don't know too much about MP. It is a pity FFH end its development too earlier. It feels there are still many rooms of polishment.
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(February 12th, 2020, 18:50)swapoer Wrote: Wow, thanks a lot. Didn't expect the long and informative answer.
I recently play Vox Populis of Civ V a lot. That mod has very good design. Tall and wide are all viable in SP. Don't know too much about MP. It is a pity FFH end its development too earlier. It feels there are still many rooms of polishment.

There are a fair few mods available for FfH2. Some like EitB from this site did a lot of work on balance and making weak civs more viable without killing uniqueness. And there are plenty of other mods out there like Master of Mana which add different elements to the base mods. May be worth your time looking them up.
Travelling on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
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(February 13th, 2020, 16:03)Brian Shanahan Wrote:
(February 12th, 2020, 18:50)swapoer Wrote: Wow, thanks a lot. Didn't expect the long and informative answer.
I recently play Vox Populis of Civ V a lot. That mod has very good design. Tall and wide are all viable in SP. Don't know too much about MP. It is a pity FFH end its development too earlier. It feels there are still many rooms of polishment.

There are a fair few mods available for FfH2. Some like EitB from this site did a lot of work on balance and making weak civs more viable without killing uniqueness.  And there are plenty of other mods out there like Master of Mana which add different elements to the base mods.  May be worth your time looking them up.

Thanks. I am aware of them. I am currently playing EMM, since it include EitB. 
Maybe I would give MoM extend a try, I played it like 10 years ago. It don't come with MNAI and this is a downside.


I have read a lot AAR from this forum and learned a lot strategies too. One feature of Civ V or Vox Populis is that you can only put 4 food/turn into the production of worker and setttler. I used to think it is lame, but I now see the reason behind it now. Vox Populis is bit more extreme, producing settler reduce pop by one. This is a reintroduced featrue fro Civ III.

Well, although I really like Vox Populis, the difference between civs is not big enough for replay. FFH2 is still my favorite.
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